Building a ship in the desert: Just say No to the proposed Earth-

Some of you may receive the Moon Miners' Manifesto, a periodical of the
Moon Society. Recently there have been some articles advocating NASA's
plans for a space station located at the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrangean point.

I think that implementing such an idea would be a terrible mistake. If
such a station were built prior to the establishment of a healthy Moon
base, then all of its radiation protection and resupply needs would have
to be satisfied from Earth. This is not the position in which we want to
be as advocates of the goals of SSI. We should instead advocate going
directly to the Moon and then possibly building such an L1 transportation
node at a much later date. The MMM advocates building both in parallel,
but this is sheer fantasy --- no foreseeable budget is going to be able to
support both a Moon base and an L1 station.

An L1 station is a couple of kilometers-per-second removed from a source
of raw materials for radiation shielding, oxygen supply, and the like. We
need to begin to utilize extra-terrestrial resources as soon as possible,
not build another ship in the desert.

If at a later date we build a mass-driver or some similar mechanism for
moving raw materials off the Moon into cislunar space, then would be an
appropriate time to consider building an L1 transportation node. That
time is not now. We have to get to the Moon first and do a lot of things
there before we should consider building an L1 station. To do it before
or contemporaneously with going to the Moon would be folly.

Ron